Dress or Patchwork? Visions of Excess in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Miguel de Beistegui
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Readers of Proust will no doubt have in mind the page from Finding Time Again in which Marcel compares his book with a dress, and a cathedral. [1] Thanks in part to Luc Fraisse’s L’Œuvre cathédrale. Proust et l’architecture médiévale, we know that Proust’s concern with cathedrals goes back to the years when he was planning and writing Jean Santeuil, and so precedes his translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens by a few years. We may even want to agree with Fraisse’s claim that “for the writer, the study of cathedrals is a way of conjuring the failure of Jean Santeuil, which occurred as an excess of dispersion and fragmentation. The cathedral embodies stability, concentration, even continuity, and is opposed to the perpetual risk of incompletion” (79). Yet are not dispersion, fragmentation, and discontinuity defining and constitutive features of À la Recherche itself? Is Proust’s great novel not also a work that integrates the very excess that led him to abandon his first novel? Further still, does this novel not assume the risk of incompletion fully, affirming it as such? If the image of the dress, as well as that of the cathedral, indeed characterizes a certain level of unity for the Recherche, and accounts for a certain plane on which the novel unfolds, it exhausts neither its nature nor its architecture. Juxtaposed to the first plane, or perhaps cutting across it, lies a second plane less apparent and less controlled, almost by definition. This second plane reveals a distinct coherence, as well as a unity, which challenges the classical conception of the novel, if not the classical concepts of philosophy itself; namely, it challenges those very concepts and values which Fraisse claims Proust saw in cathedrals: continuity, stability, and concentration. By contrast with the unity of the cathedral, or that of the dress, I will compare the unity of the second plane with that of the patchwork. Let me stress from the start, however, that the singularity of Proust’s great novel, whether at the level of its architecture or of its characters, lies perhaps in its ability to gather those two planes in a kind of productive tension, one that elevates each plane to a superior degree of expression. We shall see this tension reach its climax in Marcel’s first kiss to Albertine, which I will analyze in some detail. The truly philosophical point I intend to make is that this tension and intersection between the two planes of the novel has an ontological dimension, applicable to—and verifiable in—a number of other fields. If there is a philosophical conclusion to draw from the question we will be concerned with, and if there is, for that matter, something like a philosophy of Proust’s novel (one we should be careful to distinguish from Proust’s so-called “philosophy,” or “philosophical views”), it will have to do with the manner in which two different types of planes—a plane of organisation and a plane of fragmentation—coexist and interact. It will have to do with the manner in which the structure, outline, and organic unity of the work find themselves confronted with an excess they cannot integrate, a fracture they cannot reduce. It will be a matter, therefore, of analysing the manner in which Proust’s novel opens itself to an excess that once threatened to annihilate it, but which it is now in a position to recognize in its ontological dimension and its artistic potential.
In the second part of Proust and Signs, written for the second edition, Deleuze raises quite explicitly the question I am concerned with, namely, that of the unity of the Recherche. [2] Specifically, he raises the question of what I would call the other unity of the Recherche, thus taking up the challenge that Proust’s novel poses for philosophical thought. This unity, he suggests, is not the one that Proust had in mind initially. It is not even, I would claim, the type of unity that one discovers only retrospectively, almost despite oneself. Such a retrospective unity is precisely the one that Proust evokes in The Prisoner, in a passage where he discusses Wagner and 19th century literature:
Wagner, as he took from his desk a delicious fragment to introduce, as a retrospectively necessary theme, into a work of which he had not yet dreamed, when he was composing it, and when, having written one mythological opera, then a second, then more, he realized he had composed a Ring Cycle, must have known something of the same intoxication Balzac felt when, casting over his novels the eyes of both a stranger and a father, and seeing in one the purity of a Raphael and in another the simplicity of the Gospel, he suddenly saw, with the light of hindsight [une illumination rétrospective] that they would be even more beautiful if brought together in a cycle in which the same characters would recur, and added to his work the final brushstroke, the most sublime of all. This unity was an afterthought, but not artificial. (144/III, 666-667; emphasis added)
Notes
[1] “I should construct my book, I don’t dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making” (343/IV, 610). Throughout, I shall refer to the English edition, followed by volume and page numbers in the French edition.